Student: APALAGHIEI VIOLETA 3RD YEAR, GERMAN ENGLISH AMERICAN LITERATURE

ISSUES OF IDENTITY IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE Introduction

Definition of America: Sense of openness of new experience, a sense of selfreliance, striking for independence, from traditional authority. American Literature is the written of literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States. Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature. However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition. After the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Sarah Orne Jervett, Stephen Crane or Edgar Allan Poe. It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nations first novels were published. These fictions were too lengthy to be printed as manuscript or public reading. Publishers took a chance on these works in hopes they would become steady sellers and need to be reprinted. This was a good bet as literacy rates soared in this period among both men and women. The political conflict surrounding Abolitionism inspired some writings and these were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography. At the same time, Native American autobiography develops and, moreover, minority authors were beginning to publish fiction. Antitranscendental works from Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe all comprise the Dark Romanticism subgenre of literature popular during this time.

The American colony detached itself from the emerging British Empire because, among other reasons, it had developed its own individual identity. Several aspects of that identity are: American exceptionalism, the role of the Frontier in defining the American self, how America was for the descendants of the English and how it was for the other nationalities and also how these aspects are represented in literature. American exceptionalism is a guideline that shows how the American nation could have developed. It is the theory that the United States is different from other countries in that it has a specific world mission to spread liberty and democracy. Throughout history the nation that wished to be the epitome of democracy butchered the indigenous population, imported slaves, denied women their votes and so on. The ever expanding American frontier represented opportunity for the white settlers, the Native Americans however were forced to see their homeland dwindle and so became deprived of their holistic way of life living among nature. The frontier, the wilderness and the return to nature are all prominent in American literature.

The Frontier

For more than a century, American intellectuals looked about for something in the American experience worth writing about, worth the effort. And it was the untainted expansive American wilderness. Europe had long since lost any open range and territory, but the American Frontier was wide open. For those fleeing tyrannies abroad, the Frontier represented new opportunity to begin again where reward matched each ounce of invested labour. It is fluid and keeps two sides in constant interaction. It was Turner that fronted the hypothesis that the American identity was based on the Frontier. His frontier is explicitly the meeting point between savagery and civilization and his central contention was that the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development. Turner maintained that the West, not the proslavery South or the antislavery North, was the most important among American sections, and that the novel attitudes and institutions produced by the frontier, especially through its encouragement of democracy, had been more significant than the imported European heritage in shaping American society. The winds of the prairies swept away almost at once a mass of old habits and prepossessions. Said one of these pioneers in a letter to friends in the

East: If you value ease more than money or prosperity, don't come.... Hands are too few for the work, houses for the inhabitants, and days for the day's work to be done.... Next if you can't stand seeing your old New England ideas, ways of doing, and living and in fact, all of the good old Yankee fashions knocked out of shape and altered, or thrown by as unsuited to the climate, don't be caught out here. But if you can bear grief with a smile, can put up with a scale of accommodations ranging from the soft side of a plank before the fire (and perhaps three in a bed at that) down through the middling and inferior grades; if you are never at a loss for ways to do the most unpracticable things without tools, if you can do all this and some more come on. . . . It is a universal rule here to help one another, each one keeping an eye single to his own business. (The Frontier in American History - Frederick Jackson Turner) The west was indeed wild. People were forced to make do with whatever they would find. While some writers where already parodying previous character types others were militating for their people by showing the truth behind preconceived ideas. Freedom had arrived for African Americans yet they were not treated equally. Sarah Orne Jewett offers us an account of the American untamed wilderness. We feel the gist of rough country living in her short stories especially in The White Heron. The author offers an optimistic message: life is hard when one is away from the city but still it is possible to live and existence in concordance with nature. The description illustrates that life in the country had been shaped in the American minds. Silvia has already been living in the New England Woods with her grandmother for over a year now. She has adapted well to the new environment talking to animals, walking the cow, but her existence is shaken when she meets an ornithologist, who was searching for a white heron. Initially the girl is reticent to the ornithologist but latter she grows to like him. Still when she is faced with deciding between him and nature she is left silent. Sylvia attained emotional stability by remaining true to her own feeling and beliefs and by refusing to yield to the masculine dominance in a patriarchal world. There are a number of ways to interpret this attitude: the author created a certain personality for the character, had she been outspoken she would have become somebody else then if symbolically Silvia represents nature itself so cannot use words. For the American intellectuals, the frontier and wilderness took on a spirituality best translated in Ralph Waldo Emerson's touchstone essay, Nature (1844).

The Wild West Enormous popular attention in the media focuses on the second half of the 19th century, a period sometimes called the Old West, or the Wild West. Frontier history tells the story of the creation and defense of communities, the use of the land, the development of markets, and the formation of states. It is a tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, and the merging of peoples and cultures that gave birth and continuing life to America. The vast literature of the American Old West evolved from dime novels of the late 1800s which portrayed life on the frontier as an idealized clash pitting virtuous cowboys and lawmen against savage Indians or outlaw gunfighters. It means violence and chaotic atmosphere. Westerns often portray how desolate and hard life was for American frontier families. These families are faced with change that would severely alter their way of life. Native Americans have been portrayed with more sympathy in recent decades and, increasingly, as complex individuals who are neither vilified nor idealized. Native American authors have been among the most distinguished contributors to Western literature. In Steven Cranes short story The Blue Hotel we find the idea of the wild West. Though Scully attempts to engage him in conversation, the Swedes attention is on all of the guests. He remarks upon the West being a very dangerous area and appeals to each man when he makes his claim about Western violence. He is frightened because of his idea of how violent the West is. When the Easterner explains that the Swede has most likely read dime novels about the West that falsely promote its image as a place filled with violence and danger, this dialogue provides useful exposition to the reader. He confirms that the West is in fact not a dangerous place (nor are places farther west than Nebraska). The Swede refuses to be part of the society he finds himself in, the hotel, and following his pride, he decides to leave the hotel and enter a new world in which gets him killed. Ironically, though the Easterner is correct, the Swede will end up dying due to violence, and not the violence that the Swede instigated in this section.

Savage versus Noble Savage The romance of the indigenous people of North America was the elaboration of the Noble Savage concept that dates to the 18th century French JeanJacques Rousseau, who claimed that people who grow up in nature, removed from the entrapments of society, live a more pristine, if not more fully human existence. Traffic with society, so the logic of the concept goes, necessarily compromises away native human traits and natural abilities, what St. Jean de Cvecoeur refers to as certain constitutional propensities. In short, the Noble Savage is an innocent who knows no evil and who lives his or her life in an idyllic state of natural splendour. While scholars debate as to whether Jean-Jacques Rousseau was truly the creator of the literary tradition of the Noble Savage, the concept dates all the way back to the classical period. The overriding literary image of the Noble Savage throughout history is one of a figure who is uncorrupted by civilization and possesses a kind of innocence that has been lost by civilized cultures. Roy Pearce argues that the Noble Savage was a literary invention used for the purpose of creating a history and a culture in America, but one in which the idea of savagismcompromised the idea of the noble savage and then absorbed and reconstituted it. The Noble Savage flourishes well into the 20th century with William Faulkner's old Sam Fathers, half black, half Chickasaw chief to whom the Sunday primitives come once a year to repeat their annual, ritual hunt for the Bear.

The half - blood Historian James Axtell remarked the need in colonial American studies for greater attention to the points of intercultural contact, perhaps through the study of people who travelled back and forth across the cultural frontier., such as half-breeds. One approach is provided by the literature stimulated by the Frontier in the broadest sense or, perhaps, by the idea of the Frontier during the 19th century. Although important studies of the American Indian in the 19th century American Literature have appeared, virtually no examination has been made of the half-blood the half-Indian, the half-white who plays a significant role in the popular fiction of this same century. Although related to the Indian, the half-blood possessed certain unique characteristics and provided 19th century American authors with several different literary problems and possibilities. The fictional half-blood, like the fictional Indian, embodied both

fact and myth, but in contrast to the Indian, he was not so readily depicted as either a Noble Savage or the barbaric antithesis to civilization. 19th century discussions of the half-blood reveal unresolved conflicts related to those centered upon the Indian. According to Pearce, 19th century poets and playwrights relied on the strategy of killing off the noble savage and of giving him a vision of the higher and better life which was to come. Yet even novelists avoided the reality of the Indian, for in their work the red race essentially embodies an idea, provides a means for putting civilizations into relief, emblemizes what white society has abandoned for better or for worse.

Conclusion Many nations have come to live on the American lands. The struggle of finding ones identity has been an important theme for the 19th century American writers because of the period the country of America was going through. Identity was a question of social or emotional identification that depended on ones beliefs and concepts about life. The first people to arrive were the Native Americans, then the English, after which the slave trade introduced African populations. These waves were followed by immigrants from all over the globe. Not only did immigration provide cheap labour, it also added new shades to American Culture. The guidelines of American Exceptionalism were never followed. The rich cultural environment leads to a diverse literary tradition. Not all writers in the century made so clear a distinction between full- and mixed-blood Indians, but a difference nonetheless surfaces in their works. Sources:
Summary of American Literature through the 19th century (an excerpt from

1st.Vol. of The great Republic by the Master Historians) The Frontier in American Culture Richard White, Patricia Nelson Limerick The Frontier in American History Frederick Jackson Turner The half-blood: A Cultural Symbol in 19th century American Fiction William J. Scheick Indian Blood : Reflections on the Reckoning and Refiguring of Native North American Identity Pauline Turner Strong, Barrik Van Winkle www.distancelearningassociates.com/eng2327/Frontier.html www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_literature